News

ASK THE EDITOR: How the P-E gathers global news, comics and crossword puzzles

Ever wonder how newspapers assemble news reports from across the country or the globe? Or, how we get the comics page put together?

Debbie, a seven-day subscriber and longtime reader, sent me an email explaining that one of the things she enjoys most is the Sunday crossword. But she wrote this:

Why has the Sunday puzzle page (in the PE) started using the L.A. Times Sunday crossword puzzle on the same day as the Times? This is the third week in a row, and is profoundly disappointing. One of the reasons I subscribe to the Sunday Times is for the crossword puzzle. Until recently, I have looked forward to three challenging Sunday crosswords. Not anymore. Who got lazy? Someone is going to an easy source for that top puzzle on the puzzle page for the Press.

First, I think it’s helpful explaining how we get the crosswords. Newspapers across the country rely and subscribe to what we will simply call wire services. Those services — much more prominent and expansive in the pre-Internet days — provide content and information ranging from international and national stories to longer-form journalism, political pieces, cartoons and puzzles.

News organizations, such as The Press-Enterprise, subscribe to select wire services and assemble pages of national stories and wire stories from, say, the Associated Press or puzzles and cartoons from, say, the Washington Post or Tribune.

Call it maximizing efficiencies. While most news organizations don’t have the staff or resources to build their own complete puzzle pages or staff offices across the country to cover an event of news value in places such as Washington, D.C. or New York, local news outfits (The P-E) do have the ability to buy into wire services. This allows them to use stories and reports from news agencies specializing in providing stories or features from across the country.

So when you read a story from the Middle East or a business story from the stock trading floor in New York or learn about oil drilling in the Arctic, there is a good chance you are reading that story from a wire service correspondent. Let’s say that correspondent, or journalist, writes for the Associated Press, a wire service. The story they write gets edited by AP editors and placed on the “wire” for other news agencies to use who pay to subscribe to the service.

That’s why you might pick up a paper in Texas or Florida and find the same exact story, written by the same exact person, just on a different page. Let’s use the example of the refugee crisis playing out across the globe.

Newspapers for a variety of reasons are not going to staff a reporter or photographer overseas to cover the crisis unless that’s one of the coverage areas that make up the core mission of the paper. It’s expensive and not part of the local coverage area for many papers, including The P-E, which is a local paper covering local issues.

Newspapers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post might indeed, have a reporter and photographer overseas. That’s part of the mission of those papers — to be national and international news agencies.

Back to the duplicate crossword. The Press-Enterprise subscribes to Tribune, which allows us to use their crossword puzzle in our Sunday edition. It’s likely that the same crossword also appears in not only the LA paper but also in other newspapers across the country. It’s part of their service.

We also subscribe to the New York Times service that allows us to use the NY Times crossword. This doesn’t help Debbie avoid the duplication of seeing the crossword on the same day in different papers she subscribes to, but hopefully, it helps explain how it appears in both newspapers.

If you have a story idea or have a question about how we cover the news, or see something in your community that needs covering, you can always reach me at mcoronado@pe.com.

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